"I believe that I may understand"
Belief is not a flimsy premise, but an essential foundation which resides outside of the consciousness of mankind within his limited sphere of existence.
The older academics of the Renaissance may have questioned the status quo, but they never rejected the final authority of something greater than anything they could ask, think, or be.
The world as we know it remains a world limited by "as we know it."
Our understanding is forever limited because of our senses or the forays of our knowledge based on our senses.
The mores of our behavior are not the product of our reason, so wrote Scottish Enlightenment Skeptic David Hume. His conception of truth and understanding undid the Rationalism and the Empiricism of his day.
Descartes' "cogito" falls apart not just because of an "I" connected to a word. The very language he was communicating in, the arguments he was making, and the production of the book in which the writings were recorded, all had occurred before his musings occurred.
The human mind on its own cannot establish reality.
Locke, and later Berkeley, posited reality based on our senses. If all of our knowledge is based on our impressions of reality, then does one readily assume that the world disappears as soon as we close our eyes? A close-minded argument, to say the least. Yet even assuming the premise that all our knowledge is based on our impressions and sensations, then we cannot know anything at all, since the moment that I let go of something that I can hold, or stop looking at something that I cannot see, then I no longer have "empirical" knowledge of what I had discerned before.
The primacy of the human intellect falters before these glaring conclusions.
Before man could reason, he had to have a reason to reason, yet the origins of our lives and communities cannot be empirically proven or rationally deduced. As Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek posited in The Fatal Conceit, the traditions followed from instinct and preceded before human reason. Yet rationalism puts a primacy on what man thinks, or what he can think, with disastrous moral implications.
The Ph.D. degree, or the Doctor of Philosophy credential, in too many ways is based on these faulty premises. The mind of man on its own cannot generate information. Yet from the German academics of the nineteenth century, the rejection of medieval classicism gave way to the arrogance of modern progressivism. Rather than revering the eternal verities of previous teachers, who had argued that scientific inquiry will expand, but political and human interests remain eternal, Progressives believed that our understanding of the world, current respect for previous traditions, also needed to be changed.
The dissemination of learning in universities transitioned from inculcating the values of the ancients to questioning them, to rejecting them, to dismissing the very foundation of stable realities and truth. French sociologist (or historian, or psychiatrist) Michel Foucault culminated this perverse regression with "truth is a thing".
If that is the argument, then nothing has meaning, even the learning in which one engages. The eternal search for truth and stability does not change for man, even if his reason concludes that the search is both interminable and fruitless. However, man's reason at best can receive and ponder information. Creating truth and instituting ideas remain a domain outside of man's intellect, no matter how broad or deep.
Economics, like a number of academic inquiries, is a "dismal" science because the subject reduces man's capacity to understand. He can respond to the information, yet he cannot postulate different responses or suggest different ways for the world to work. They rest at best "idle speculation" or "dangerous insurrection." Some traditions and accounts cannot be changed. The mind can question or speculate, but the truth of the matter cannot change.
The Ph.D phenomenon would incite individuals to believe that they can command a wider understanding of issues and thus dismiss the interests of those "not inclined to understand."
In truth, because the graduate academic community refutes the reality that truth, traditions, and other telling elements exist outside of the scope of one man's understanding, they have embraced the very stupidity which they claim to disclaim.
Ph.D may very well me "Petty, Hopeless and Dumb" as the investigations of most researchers furrow into petty interests, specific questions touching on the slimmest of issues with at most a slight impact on our world, all premised on ideas which have no basis in reality. A "Doctor" who wishes to impart something must accept that the traditions which he questions have enabled him to possess the faculties to question them in the first place.
Otherwise, his inquiries will become "hopeless", in that they are suffused with falsehood, based on "castles in the air" assumptions which resist the very steps that they stepped on to arrive at the conclusions which they have concluded.
The research of a Ph.D which ignores the primacy of faith, which recognizes realities which cannot correspond to limit, testable verifications, will be left "dumb", having nothing intelligent to impart, and imparting nothing intelligible, since the arguments proceeded from a false foundation.